Skout introduces people via smartphone

App allows people nearby, far away to chat, flirt and meet

Skout CEO Christian Wiklund says his San Francisco startup has overcome a catastrophe in which teenagers using his firm's social-networking app met and were assaulted by adults.

Skout CEO Christian Wiklund says his San Francisco startup has overcome a catastrophe in which teenagers using his firm's social-networking app met and were assaulted by adults.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

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Skout CEO Christian Wiklund says his San Francisco startup has overcome a catastrophe in which teenagers using his firm's social-networking app met and were assaulted by adults.

Skout CEO Christian Wiklund says his San Francisco startup has overcome a catastrophe in which teenagers using his firm's social-networking app met and were assaulted by adults.

Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle

Skout introduces people via smartphone

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Skout is betting that people are turning more and more to their smartphones to help them meet new people.

The mobile app lets them see people nearby and start chatting and flirting. A new feature, called "Shake to Chat," makes it even easier to start a conversation. It connects two people who are shaking their phones at the same time. Today, Skout draws 1.5 million new users a month who check in to the app an average of nine times a day for short bursts of time.

But a year ago, Skout was in a decidedly different place. In separate incidents, three teenagers had started chatting with adults through its location-based social networking app, arranged to meet them in person and were sexually assaulted.

The San Francisco startup responded immediately, shutting down its community for teenagers. A month later, it began to allow teens to sign in again, but under tighter rules and increased security and monitoring.

Teenagers, for instance, now can only connect with other teenagers who are at least 100 miles away. That way, there's less of a chance of teenagers trying to meet someone they encountered through the app.

In a recent interview, Skout CEO Christian Wiklund discussed how the startup, which has raised $22 million in funding and employs 100 people, responded to last year's incidents, and the future of location-based social networking.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q:Tell me about Skout.

A: We started in 2007, which was pre-iPhone. We wanted to build a mobile social network.

We launched a location-based social network for you and your friends. You also had a component where you could meet people in your area or around the world. The component where you were connected to your friends didn't really take off.

There were many companies at the time (such as) Loopt, BrightKite and Google Latitude. None of these companies worked out. Eventually, Facebook launched its own location component. But no stand-alone company seemed to make it happen.

The main activity of our users was they were reaching out to people locally and around the world. We didn't have that many users at the time, so even if you were in San Francisco, you might chat with people in Hong Kong. People really loved that. (So) we started re-evaluating what we were doing.

No one has claimed the people-discovery market. It is the opposite of Facebook, to help you expand your social graph, not to maintain your social graph. So that is what we started building.

There is a real need out there for meeting new people, and this is one of the big unsolved social categories out there.

Q:What is the appeal of meeting new people through an app? Do people worry about meeting someone posing as someone else?

A: It is one of the challenges. On Facebook, I have my friends, which means I am not going to post bad pictures. I am not going to post racist stuff. I am not going to do that kind of thing because my friends are there and they will see it. But on Skout, you are anonymous and you might or might not have your friends on it.

So what we have seen (on Skout) is 3 percent of users signing up will behave badly. So we ban over 75,000 people a month. We can block your device and you can never use Skout again.

We have 40 people on staff who are reviewing the forums. Our users can report users with bad behavior, and we have algorithms in place that will sniff for patterns that we have identified as something suspicious is going on here. Each report gets moderated by a human on our team.

We also have a safety board (which includes members of the nonprofits Family Online Safety Institute and Connect Safely). We report suspicious behavior, if it involves children and so forth. We have a safety center. It comes down to the education of our users. Some of them are more risky and some of them are more savvy.

Q:What is the Skout community like?

A: The average age is about 26. It is a much larger adult community than teenage community. It is around 60 percent men, 40 percent women, and the typical user is someone living in a large metropolitan area.

They like to chat. Our goal is to maximize as many human connections in the world as possible. (In the real world), you have these artificial boundaries, people you identify with. We don't care. This is people in your area. We don't care what district, what income level, what education level they have.

I think people get exposed to different kinds of people they normally wouldn't interact with in the real world. I intend to keep it that way. This is one global community. Everyone is welcome, as long as you are a good citizen.

Q:How do you plan on making money?

A: We have a virtual economy, with virtual gifts. You can (also) buy promotions for yourself, so if you want more people to check out your profile, you can place a bid. If someone checked out your profile, you can unlock that for 24 hours for roughly $1, and if someone added you to their favorites list, you can (also) unlock that. We also have ads in the app.

Long term, we are at an intersection of location and social. You can imagine a "Groupon Now" structure, (so it would be) not just about making social connections, but also about what's going on in my city. We have the ability to drive foot traffic to venues.

Q:Do you feel like you've recovered from what happened last year?

A: The network is definitely intact. It was definitely a hit to suspend a million teenagers. They were furious. It was probably the biggest decision I have ever made in this company, but it was the right decision. I would do it again. We didn't relaunch until we felt we had something safer.

We cannot promise a safe environment. Nothing will ever be 100 percent bulletproof. It's an unfortunate reflection of society. There will always be risks involved in any activity you do, so then it comes down to the education of users and taking appropriate safety measures.

It was a big hit, but we recovered. As a company, it is one of the few moments that you get to go through. That was one of those moments that you really see who in the company is committed to what we are building and who is not and almost everyone in the company was committed.

They were sleeping in the office for four weeks. I was barely home for four weeks. We were working, working, working. If the company was a teenager before the crisis, we were forced to become adults overnight.

From a company perspective, we are much stronger. It is one of those moments where you either come out strong or you don't come out at all. And I think we came out strong.